(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a stereo image matching method and system using image multiple lines. More specifically, the present invention relates to a systolic architecture based stereo image matching method and system for multiple epipolar stereo image matching.
(b) Description of the Related Art
The stereo image matching method represents a method for recreating 3-dimensional spatial information from a pair of 2-dimensional images. As shown in FIG. 1, the stereo image matching method indicates a method for finding left and right pixels corresponding to the same position of (X, Y, Z) in the 3-dimensional space on image lines on the left image epipolar line and the right image epipolar line. In this instance, a disparity of “d” for the conjugate pixel pair is defined to be d=xr−xl. The disparity has distance information, and a geometrical distance calculated from the disparity is referred to as a depth. Hence, 3-dimensional distance information and shape information on an observation space can be measured by calculating the disparity in real-time from an input image.
An article of “Structure from stereo” by Umesh R. Dhond and J. K. Aggarwal from a Review, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 19(6):553-572, November/December 1989 discloses the basic concept, and a US published application of No. 2002-0025075 discloses a stereo image matching realization system.
In the above-noted prior art as shown in FIG. 12, much noise is generated in the vertical direction since the image lines gml and gmr on the mth right and left epipolar lines are independently calculated. That is, the disparity in the vertical direction on the disparity image is not accurately displayed because of an influence of noise. When the left image of FIG. 13A and the right image of FIG. 13B are input, the image with much noise is displayed as shown in FIG. 13D.